Coppice on new homestead

Good day Mark! Thanks for being available for questions.

We just moved onto a 20 acre homestead in SW Missouri. The property is about 5 acres of woodland and 15 acres of old pasture in various stages of succession surrounded on 3 sides by grown up hedge rows. I have a pretty wide variety of trees species growing naturally including various types of oak, ash, various hickory nut trees, pecans, cherry, persimmon, paw-paw, osage orange and of course eastern red cedar.

I'm working on removing the red cedar for posts and bed edging and only leaving a grove of them in the center of the property for a future "living barn" for future stock.

I'm looking to remove thick stands of mostly ash that are around 3 - 6" ABH for firewood and using those for firewood coppice. I'm also wanting to clear enough of an area to use as a willow coppice for my wife's basketry.

But one of my main objectives is to coppice the oak trees for use in mushroom production. There are a significant amount of oaks that are perfect size for mushroom logs right now 6-8" ABH. Many of them are growing in clusters of 3 to 8 is a small area, so I could thin most of them out and still leave one to grow up. From my understand oak regrows best from a stump less than 15", is this correct? If I have an area that I want to use mainly as coppice for mushrooms am I better off to take them all down to allow more light to reach the new growth? Any suggestion as to how high I should cut them from the ground?

Also do you have suggestions about good tree species to plant (or maybe something I already have) for use as tree hay for cattle, sheep and possibly horses?

I look forward to your reply and hope to be able to check out your book!

Best regards!

Here is a drone pic of our homestead with zones of use marked up. It was taken in the summer (I intend to get more pics now that the leaves are off) so it's a little hard to the stages of succession. The picture is taken from the south facing north.

The zone 4 woodland in the middle of the property I intend to let mostly untouched as it is mainly mature hardwoods with a cedar thicket on the north end. I want to use it for foraging and wildlife habitat.

The zone 3 food forest to the north of the shop was once old pasture, but now has 10-15 years of tree growth. I intend to have part of that as a willow coppice area and set the rest aside for a mixed food forest that could include coppicing existing trees, which in this area is mainly ash and a few oak.

The pastures in the back of the property have about 10+ years of growth on them. About 50% Cedar with the balance a mix of ash and oak. I want to convert it into Silvo pasture, so I'm planning on removing the cedar and coppicing the oaks and ash. Any thoughts or potential issues you see with that?

The hedge row on the west side of the properties and has a lot of younger oak growing in clusters and that is where I'd like to have my primary oak coppice, again with the main focus being use for mushroom log production along with firewood.

The Food Forest behind the house is mainly mature hardwoods where I'm planning to have my log yard, along with various layers of trees and shrubs like persimmon, paw-paw, elderberry and hazelnut. (There are a few areas that get a decent amount of sun). I also plan on thinning out some of the mature ash for use in building projects. The ash borer recently showed up in our County so I figure I'd harvest the wood before it gets destroyed.

Thanks again!

Joshua Colt wrote:Good day Mark! Thanks for being available for questions.

We just moved onto a 20 acre homestead in SW Missouri. The property is about 5 acres of woodland and 15 acres of old pasture in various stages of succession surrounded on 3 sides by grown up hedge rows. I have a pretty wide variety of trees species growing naturally including various types of oak, ash, various hickory nut trees, pecans, cherry, persimmon, paw-paw, osage orange and of course eastern red cedar.

I'm working on removing the red cedar for posts and bed edging and only leaving a grove of them in the center of the property for a future "living barn" for future stock.

I'm looking to remove thick stands of mostly ash that are around 3 - 6" ABH for firewood and using those for firewood coppice. I'm also wanting to clear enough of an area to use as a willow coppice for my wife's basketry.

But one of my main objectives is to coppice the oak trees for use in mushroom production. There are a significant amount of oaks that are perfect size for mushroom logs right now 6-8" ABH. Many of them are growing in clusters of 3 to 8 is a small area, so I could thin most of them out and still leave one to grow up. From my understand oak regrows best from a stump less than 15", is this correct? If I have an area that I want to use mainly as coppice for mushrooms am I better off to take them all down to allow more light to reach the new growth? Any suggestion as to how high I should cut them from the ground?

Also do you have suggestions about good tree species to plant (or maybe something I already have) for use as tree hay for cattle, sheep and possibly horses?

I look forward to your reply and hope to be able to check out your book!

Best regards!

Hi Joshua
Congrats on the new homestead. Sounds like you've got some great resources available to you. Yup - your oaks ought to be a prime size for good resprouting. Because light is a key variable to stimulating vigorous sprouting, I'd tend to cut a patch all at once to open up as big a gap as you can. Otherwise, the new sprouts will likely be weak and spindly. If you've got nicely formed trees that you'd like to preserve for timber/mast down the line, ideally they'd be on the northern edge of these patches.

As far as height goes, leave 2-3" of stump. That should be plenty. The book gets into a lot of detail on this as well. Good luck! We grow a lot of shiitake here and I wish we had more oak.

Check the thread on tree hay for species recommendations. Also, there's a good bit on this in the book.